VN Gov’t to look into unobserved economy

A project on unobserved economy statistics, expected to be launched next year, will serve as an important reference for the statistics sector to get up to international standards.

Director General of the General Statistics Office (GSO) Nguyen Bich Lam announced the information at a press conference in Ha Noi on Wednesday.

Lam said the project would improve the quality of statistics to fully and correctly reflect the socio-economic situation, thus better serving sectors and localities’ planning.

An unobserved economy is an economy that reflects the performance results of all economic entities in society but whose performance has not been quantified.

This economic entity is comprised of several elements.

First is the informal economy which is all legal business operations but without registration with the authority to avoid paying income tax, value added tax and other required duties to the State.

It also relates to all illegal economic activities, including drug trafficking, prostitution and unregistered business.

It is also the official economy that has not been officially observed by authorities and work carried out in households, like cleaning, cooking and washing, that’s not accounted for.

On February 1, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc approved the project, aiming to comprehensively reflect the country’s economic scale, improve statistics expertise to international standards, refine laws and improve the efficiency of State management of the economy.

Nguyen Thi Huong, GSO Deputy General Director, said along with the development of the economy, unobserved economic activities appear more frequently, diversely and complexly in many fields.

In recent years, the statistics industry has been innovating and improving the quality of collecting statistics, especially input information, contributing to reducing the scope and scale of this economic sector, Huong said.

However, there are still many unobserved economic activities whose production and business results have not been fully updated because they are missed in the statistical data collection processes.

This year, the GSO will aim to complete its studies of and learn from international experience, determine the scale of the unobserved economy and select appropriately measured solutions, Huong said.

From next year, it will begin collecting data on the unobserved economy and integrate the data in the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), the GDP of centrally-run cities and provinces and relevant targets, she said. — VNS